Advanced Topics in Computer Science
Unit 6: Trees
Students learn hierarchical data structures and the recursive algorithms that make trees powerful.
Unit Focus
What this unit is really teaching
The unit links recursion, searching, and structure design through binary trees and binary search trees.
Key Topics
- +Tree vocabulary: root, leaf, parent, child, height, depth, and subtree
- +Binary trees and recursive traversal patterns
- +Preorder, inorder, postorder, and level-order traversal
- +Binary search tree search, insertion, and deletion concepts
- +Balanced versus unbalanced trees and runtime consequences
- +Expression trees, decision trees, and hierarchical data modeling
Practice Work
Implementation and analysis tasks
Student task
Implement recursive tree traversals and print structured trace output.
Student task
Build a binary search tree and compare performance with a sorted ArrayList.
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Work through the concepts, code, edge cases, and runtime analysis with 1:1 guidance.